by Jeff Koehler
In 2001, at twenty-eight years old—the youngest in modern Darjeeling history— Sanjay was named manager of Glenburn when the garden was taken over by new owners. “I jumped the queue,” he quipped, adding with a laugh that this didn’t endear him to many at the Planters’ Club. Sanjay has a deep and infectious enthusiasm for what he does, and a sense of pride that permeates his undertakings. No matter if he has been up into the late hours of the night, he rises early to check on the factory. He is energetic but has a calm presence and uses a quick and gentle wit to diffuse moments rather than his voice. Things get quietly done. He carries complete authority on the garden, but out of respect rather than fear, and appears extremely well liked by the Gorkhas, with whom he banters in their own language.
“Tea planting, as a profession, is unrivaled in the varied interests it involves,” wrote tea historian William Ukers in the 1930s, “but its greatest attraction lies in the fact that it appeals to the creative instinct in man.”22 That appeal remains. Tea planting, Sanjay said, “is unrivaled in scope for creativity. It’s endless.”
For him, there is creativity in dealing with a thousand full-time workers and all the elements that come with running a 758-hectare (1,873-acre) estate with eight villages housing 708 families and some 5,000 people. There is creativity in the field, getting the bushes to produce the best leaves they can, and in the factory, eking out the finest possible teas from them.
When Sanjay began at Glenburn, the garden was not known for its consistently high-quality teas. Under him, Glenburn began steadily turning out excellent harvests, with a few of his vintages being simply superb. Tubelike canisters, decorated with antique botanical drawings of tea plants and flowers, of Glenburn’s various flushes sell in some of the most exclusive shops in India and abroad.
While one of the estate’s newly developed specialty teas recently won an important industry award, Sanjay is particularly proud of the excellent monsoon teas, made when the leaf quality is the worst and the conditions are the most difficult, much in the way a chef admires a sublime dish created using only the cheapest, boniest fish in the sea: taking inferior raw materials, working within—even being inspired by—their constraints, and, as he says, “throwing them out in a certain fantastic light.”
One duty that Sanjay, perhaps uniquely, relishes is that of snake catcher. Glenburn has cobras, kraits, and vipers—the Big Three of deadly snake families in India—as well as other, less venomous species. “Snakes control the rodents on the farm,” he said, scrolling through some recent photos on his smartphone of him holding snakes. “There used to be a reward paid for every snake that was killed. Now I pay a reward for every snake that is alive.” He shrugged. “So they call me.”
His snake catching began at five and has not been without its mishaps. A highly venomous Indian cobra—Naja naja, with its flared hood and double-monocle markings—bit him on the left hand. “I was thirteen and holding a cobra and riding a 250 cc motorcycle,” Sanjay said, screwing his finger into his temple. He spent two and half months in the hospital as the doctors tried to stop the local necrosis—where the flesh dies and rots away—on his hand and danger of gangrene. At one point, doctors even wanted to amputate his arm at the elbow, he explained, sipping a well-watered Scotch whisky on the burra bungalow’s deep, wide verandah. They managed to save it through a series of surgeries, including a skin graft from his thigh to a sizable part of the top of his hand. The scar runs from above the wrist to near the knuckles.
On Glenburn he continued to use his bare hands to catch snakes, placing them in an old plastic bag and driving to a secluded spot on the estate to release them away from the villages. Sometimes plans go awry. In late spring, a ten-foot-long python he had captured slithered out of the bag in the backseat. The snake wound under the driver’s seat and nestled around the pedals as he jolted down a steep gravel garden road. He laughed at the absurdity of it and found a photo of himself catching hold of the snake near the steering wheel. He wrested the python back into the sack and continued down to the river. He slipped off his shoes and crossed the low, premonsoon river to let it go. In one hand he held the snake’s head—the size of a small dog—and with the other its body, as the serpent wound a stretch of itself around his upper arm, slipping the tip of the tail under a loop as if tying a nautical knot. As Sanjay stood on the shore, the snake cinched its grip. In a photograph of him at that moment, his head has quickly turned, his expression changed, his flashy smile gone.
He laughed at the image and looked down at his empty tumbler. “It’s time for dinner, yeah?”
* * *
* This was replaced in 1999 with the Foreign Exchange Management Act, FEMA.
* Rajah Banerjee is a galvanizing figure and the lone person in the area about whom everyone offers an opinion. From fellow managers it is rarely positive. One source of recent criticism is that Makaibari is now packaging lower-priced green tea and a black tea called Apoorva and selling them widely on the national market from leaves sourced outside his garden. “It has degraded his brand,” one merchant said. But it has made it the best-known Darjeeling tea in India, with forest-green or bright yellow packets emblazoned with Makaibari’s ubiquitous logo widely recognized across the country. “Envy,” his defenders call such sniping. Even his detractors say, “You have to appreciate his ability,” and acknowledge what he has done in terms of the reputation of Darjeeling and its teas and his ability to soak up most of the media attention.
CHAPTER 14
Crises
Vast as a continent, India has an appetite that’s great, and potential that’s even greater. We are in her century. The country is growing in power and stature on the world stage. Flexing newly toned muscles causes global repercussions as it vies to become one of the century’s three great powers. She’s an innovative, dynamic place where the modern and the traditional exist side by side—IT workers and naked, ash-smeared sadhus, tridents held high, striding with righteousness down a city street; bullock carts and Google glasses; pilgrimages up the Ganges and a mission to Mars.
The country’s population is more than 1.2 billion and set to eclipse China’s by 20301—the same year it is slated to become the world’s third-largest economy. The swelling middle class now numbers around 300 million, up from just 25 million in the early 1990s. Such economic clout is not without precedence. “During the first millennium a.d. merchants referred to India as the ‘Bird of Gold’ due to the glittering dynamism of its market,” the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company stated in a 2007 paper on the rise of India’s consumer class. From a.d. 1 until a.d. 1000 India had the world’s largest economy, accounting for a third of the global gross domestic product (GDP)—three times greater than Western Europe’s and significantly higher than the entire Roman Empire’s 21 percent.2 By 1500, India had fallen to second, at 24.4 percent (compared to China’s 24.8 percent). During Mughal rule, it maintained its vigor and ranking, but then slipped under the British. By 1820, it had fallen to 16 percent (to China’s 33 percent), and at independence in 1947 to a meager 4 percent. The slide continued, its global GDP shrinking to 3.1 percent in 1973.3
But it turned, eventually. The sluggish economy built momentum and sprinted ahead to double digits, hitting 10.5 percent economic growth in 2010. Though it has since cooled, the World Bank hailed this turnabout as “one of the most significant achievements of our times.”4
Yet among breakneck growth and staggering accomplishments that include the doubling of life expectancy, leaps in literacy, becoming polio-free, and an agricultural revolution in which India has achieved self- sufficiency in almost all products (and surpluses in staples such as rice and wheat), stiff growing pains remain for the world’s largest democracy. Poverty continues to be a major challenge for India. While the percentage of those in poverty has decreased over the last years, because of population growth the gross number of poor has actually increased. More than 400 million live below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 a day, a third of the world’s total living i
n such poverty.5 Per capita expenditure on food has risen while, paradoxically, caloric intake has decreased: More than 30 percent of India’s population are getting below the benchmark twenty-four hundred calories a day.6 An overwhelming 40 percent of the world’s malnourished children are in India, an estimated 217 million.7 Amid the many other serious health matters, the country has a quarter of the global burden of tuberculosis, with an estimated 2.2 million new cases every year8—someone in India dies every ninety seconds from TB.9 Delhi is now the world’s most polluted city.10
Creating jobs is a challenge for the government. Nearly half of India’s population is under twenty-five years old—a bottom-heavy demographic that could become a time bomb if the GDP hits the breaks and growth decelerates too much. Providing energy is another challenge. India has around 17 percent of the world’s population and is the fourth-largest consumer of energy after the USA, China, and Russia,11 but according to OPEC, it has only about one third of a single percent of the globe’s proven oil reserves.
Inflation has hit double digits, and the currency has lost a third of its value in the last two years. For the first decade of the twenty-first century the exchange rate varied between Rs 40 and Rs 50 to $1. In August 2011, it was trading just above Rs 44 when it began to slide. And then tumble. It lost more than 13 percent of its value in three months over the summer of 2013, bottoming out at Rs 68.85 at the end of August, when it sank 3.7 percent on its biggest single-day percentage drop in more than two decades. As 2014 began, it had edged back closer to Rs 62, but it would take significantly more push to return to its Rs 55 level, where it had been before its historic summer 2013 nosedive.
While these are all serious issues that directly or indirectly affect Darjeeling, a number of specific local problems are particularly pressing and immediately more devastating to its tea industry.
Darjeeling tea is under serious threat. India’s marquee product is fighting for its future on three separate and crippling fronts that have already pushed production numbers down to their lowest level in many decades and thrust the industry into dire straits: changes in the climate, labor issues, and a political fight for independence from West Bengal.
Hurry Mohun Sannial, overseer of Bengal’s Public Works Department, wrote the first history of Darjeeling authored by a person of Indian origin and to be published in Bengali. He fretted that the weather was changing. The cutting of timber and large-scale clearing of the forests was causing it to rain less. Streams carried less water, temperatures were rising, and Darjeeling was receiving less snowfall than before. Deforestation was causing problems with water retention, and he worried about the effect on the vegetation and sustainability of the land. The influx of people was also contributing to the rising temperatures. “Only God knows how densely this place, now a sort of sanatorium, will be populated in times to come.”12 He wrote his book in 1880. The viceroy had just visited Darjeeling, the town was on the cusp of being fashionable, and its tea industry would soon accelerate its growth with the arrival of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.
What would Sannial think today? The 2011 census put the population of Darjeeling’s district at more than 1.8 million, up 15 percent since 2001 and nearly 25 percent since 1991. (The Darjeeling municipality is 120,000.) This unprecedented growth has brought urbanization, industrialization, and road building. Increased traffic has resulted in a keen uptick of pollution and further destabilization of already unsteady slopes with the continual vibrations from heavy trucks and buses. Long backups make getting to Darjeeling from the plains arduous, and traffic jams in the city itself form in the early hours of the day and last into the evening. The hills are being overharvested for food and overgrazed by animals, stripped illegally of their timber to use for firewood and home building, and gradually being deforested. With climatic changes, the weather has become erratic. Glaciers are receding. Daily temperatures have risen, nights don’t cool as they once did, and a sudden hailstorm can batter a hillside of tea bushes with ice.
Particularly problematic is the erratic and unpredictable monsoon. “The spread is uneven,” said water-management consultant R. N. Chatterjee. “In total, not a significant drop if you see the general statistics,” but the monsoon now generally begins later. As rain affects a garden’s production during the prime manufacturing periods, some gardens have started irrigating their dehydrated bushes as a precaution. Irrigation isn’t to increase yield, Chatterjee added, “but as a tool against, or insurance against, crop loss. It’s only for obtaining what they would normally have attained.” This is especially important with the opening harvest. Hitting first flush is key. “It’s like running the hundred-meter dash,” said Sanjay Sharma. “If you stumble out of the blocks, you are still running, but you can never catch up.”
“We always start the new year with a drought,” the DTA’s Sandeep Mukherjee said. “When we want rain, there is none, and when we don’t, there is too much” goes the typical complaint by tea planters. At Glenburn, rain measurements show the garden received nine inches less during the 2013 monsoon than in the previous one. But then the rain came when it wasn’t supposed to. “In October we had sixteen centimeters [6.5 inches] of rain, compared to less than two centimeters [0.75 inches] in 2012,” Sharma said at the end of the season.
The key for tea is that the rainfall be evenly distributed. The Darjeeling area lacks ponds or reservoirs to trap the abundance when it does fall. The water just runs off the land rather than being absorbed into it. Natural underground wells and perennial springs are not being refilled. The streams have been reduced to trickles, and taps frequently go dry.
The felling of timber is exacerbating the situation. The trees not only absorb the monsoon rain and gradually release moisture into the earth and mountain springs, but also anchor the land with their roots and protect topsoil. With their disappearance when it rains, the soil on the steep slopes erodes, and landslides are a severe problem. Deep, V-shaped gullies scar the hillsides. Seen for miles around, they are eyed with concern as they slowly expand and threaten to slide even farther. The tradition of harvesting ginger, potatoes, onions, and other root crops in September and October, just after the monsoon, makes the land even more vulnerable to erosion by breaking up the soil.
Even the soil that isn’t being washed away is worn-out, depleted. Decades of use of pesticides and fertilizers have rendered the soil barren and reduced its quality.
The tea bushes are dying and being replaced at a rate of only 2 percent a year. Time is a primary factor, as it take years for a bush to come to full bearing. Five years plus one additional year for every thousand feet, runs the planter’s rule of thumb, but various factors, including the weather, affect this. A section on Gopaldhara planted at seven thousand feet took fourteen to fifteen years to produce a good, full harvest. Added to this is the fear of tearing up the fragile hillsides and of compromising quality by replacing the often-century-old bushes. “The old ones have the quality that Darjeeling is known for,” said Vijay Dhancholia at Marybong. “You don’t want to mess with Darjeeling quality.”
Quality remains the optimal word. With limited output and high production costs, Darjeeling can never compete in price or volume. “You have to make quality teas,” said Rishi Saria at Gopaldhara. “Unless you are making excellent-quality teas, why should anyone talk to us?”
The Darjeeling tea industry employs around fifty-five thousand permanent workers and another eighteen thousand temporary ones during the mid-March-to-mid-November plucking season.
But unauthorized worker absenteeism has become acute. In summer, Suman Das, assistant manager at Thurbo, said it was 30 percent on the estate. “Fifteen years ago when I started it was five percent maximum. Maximum.” Even just five years ago, it was only 5–10 percent for most gardens. No longer. When the 2013 plucking season began in March, the DTA put the average at 25 to 30 percent. Yet it ran higher than that on most estates as the season progressed. “The leaf is there,” said the factory manager at Goomtee in July, “but
the workers are not.” Goomtee was seeing 30 to 35 percent absenteeism. Some days it hit 40 percent. Several gardens struggled to contain levels that reached close to 50 percent.
Money is the knee-jerk answer given for the sudden change. From 2001 to 2008, the daily wage for a plucker rose just a total of Rs 12.10. In 2008—after a fifteen-day strike by workers—it was increased from Rs 53.90 to Rs 67, with a cumulative Rs 13.10 increase spread over three years. In 2011, the unions wanted the daily wage to rise to between Rs 120 and 154. Predictably, owners balked. As the first flush got under way, unions embargoed the dispatch of all tea. Gardens were heavily guarded and not a single leaf was allowed to leave. In early April, the owners, desperate not to miss out on their important spring harvest, agreed to Rs 90 plus perks valued around the same amount. That was a 34 percent increase—the largest annual wage increase in Darjeeling’s history. As 70 percent of the cost of producing tea is labor, that immediately pushed up a garden’s total production cost by nearly a quarter.
Among some management, the thought was “Well, we’ll pay, but at least they’ll show up to work,” one planter recalled. “They didn’t.”
For many workers, the pay is simply not enough for essentials, much less to get ahead. “Life is too expensive,” a worker on Makaibari complained. “You can buy nothing with ninety rupees.” In nearby Kurseong, a liter of petrol costs Rs 85 (roughly $6.20 per gallon), and a chicken in the market costs Rs 180. Individual cigarettes sell for Rs 6 in the small shops around Makaibari (a day’s work for fifteen smokes!), a single building brick for a house costs Rs 7, and a two-liter bottle of Coke costs Rs 52. Prices are higher on gardens farther from towns and their markets. That same Coke costs Rs 68 on Glenburn, and a bar of Lux soap goes for Rs 22, with the more luxurious Dove for exactly double that.